Using resources gathered for the CRUMB website (http://www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb/),
this paper presents some key information and debates regarding the curating
of new media art, both on the web and in conventional gallery spaces.
Including quotes from Sarah Diamond, Steve Dietz, Peter Weibel, Benjamin
Weil and Kathy Rae Huffman, the paper discusses issues of how artists
are paid, how new media art is archived, how audiences might respond to
new media art, and the aesthetics concerning the presentation of new media
genres. Practical examples from the authors' experience of curating
new media art are also given.

Museums consider having web presence as obligatory --
as membership, information, e.commerce, etc. and then eventually an art
space. The art space is not quite an afterthought, but it is not the prime
focus.

(Weil, Sins of Change 2000)

... the Susan Collins artwork Audio Zone is
spread around the exhibition space. The audience must wear infra-red headphones,
which at certain points receive seductive voices urging you to 'touch'
and 'stroke' the triggered video projections of nipples, lips
and keyboard buttons. The desk staff who issue the headphones quickly
noticed a very common misconception in the audience, and now carefully
explain to each person that this is NOT 'a guide to the exhibition.'

(Graham, 1994)

The problem with curating new media art is that the fascinating
range of challenges is matched only by the dearth of data and material
available to help curators. Comparatively, the field of museum interpretative
and educational new media is well resourced and debated. On seeing a piece
of new technology in a gallery or museum, a member of the public is justifiably
likely to assume that it is some kind of interpretative aid rather than
an artwork in itself.

General new media theory seems to be in plentiful supply;
so much so, that the few accomplished new media artworks which manage
to get produced tend to emerge staggering under the weight of eager academics.
When it comes to the practical issues of presenting new media to the public,
however, even Peter Weibel of ZKM admits that it is "difficult not to
make an error because there is not much information ..." (Weibel, 2000).
There have been some conferences and some skirmishing on discussion lists
concerning new media art curating in particular, but nothing like the
regular, archived, published events devoted to the web as interpretation.

It is this relative absence which the Curatorial Resource
for Upstart Media Bliss attempts to address, starting with the collection
and presentation of some pithy information and opinion relevant to overworked
new media curators. CRUMB forages beneath the tables of education, museum
evaluation and media theory for tasty morsels, as well as going straight
to the horses' mouths of curators and artists for useful experience
and hindsight. The website includes bibliographies, links, interviews
with leading curators, and some useful nitty-gritty concerning contracts,
etc. The CRUMB website, and this paper, draw from a wider research interest
in new media curating at the University of Sunderland, and particularly
from the experience of the curators. Working both in new media and mixed
visual arts contexts, between us we have experience in working with budgets
from £200 to £200,000, and in doing research in places from Banff and
Minneapolis to Bangalore and Ljubljana. Having worked with institutions
from artists-run centres to local authority galleries, we have sympathy
with various devils, and can commiserate with Barbara London when she
says that "It's tough to get museums to change, to keep moving in new
directions. In early days of video we didn't have access-- parcel
post is how they got around." (Sins of Change 2000).

It is very much early days for any discussion of new media
art curatorship. At times the debate seems to move very fast, and at others
it seems fossilized, with huge disparities in awareness and expectations.
In Britain in 1997, the announcement of the Turner Prize nominees unleashed
a surprising flood of popular press puzzlement that video could be considered
to be art. On the other hand, in India, a healthily hybrid approach means
that artists like Shilpa Gupta (http://members.tripod.com/shilpagupta/)
can move between sculptural installation and Internet-based art fairly
comfortably. The field of 'new', new-ish or upstart media is
rather difficult to discuss when neither the terminology nor the genres
are fixed. The conference Computing Culture: Defining New Media Genres
(1998) suggested that artefacts could be considered within the genres
of Database, Interface, Spatialization and Navigation. Festivals and institutions
do seem to be starting to divide their calls for work into rough categories
of Net.Art, Single Screen, Performative, and some variety of interactive
or non-interactive Installation (Public Art and 2D Digital Images being
occasional orbiting companions). Whilst net.art has netted the majority
of debate and controversy, CRUMB also covers physical new media works
in conventional gallery spaces.

This paper uses some resources from the CRUMB website to
consider some current debates for curating new media art, falling under
four headings: Artists, Archives, Audiences, and Aesthetics.

Artists

His idea was clear: a museum has to follow what artists
are doing. Art history has to follow art. Not the opposite. Too much today
the museum wants to prescribe what art is.

(Weibel
,2000, referring to Alfred H. Barr of MOMA)

Curatorial decisions are made through a need to justify
hardware and software investments. Artists are a test case.

(Vuk
Cosic, net.art pioneer, Sins of Change 2000)

Art and science institutions have sometimes invited artists
in to play with their equipment, only to find them fundamentally challenging
their whole value systems:

[new media art] practice challenges the notion of authorship,
has to do with collective authorship; non western ideas of discourse is
something the museum has always had trouble with. And what has happened
on the net is a brain of a social collectivity, that allows discursive
practice ... How do you support and preserve a critical practice that
is inclusive ... how can you do that when it is difficult to pin down
authorship?

(Sara Diamond, Banff Centre
for the Arts, Sins of Change 2000)

Artists, whether individually or collectively, have not
only presented museums with major conceptual headaches, but also been
implicated in major shifts in how educational and commercial research
institutions think about what they do. As Lynn Hershman says: "digital
artists have to adopt interdisciplinary ways of researching" (Sins of
Change 2000), not least in order to get access to equipment. In the USA,
for example, the Xerox PARC experience (Harris, 1999) openly explores
the creative conflicts between art and science research, whilst in the
UK the development of 'art-practice-led' PhDs has been involved
with a fundamental questioning of 'what is research?' (Malins
and Gray, 1999). It is the artists who make and push the new forms of
media art, even if these forms are risky, challenging or an unfinished
process: "... only the net allows us to make these works in progress.
If you are a curator it is a crime not to use it." (Olia Lialina, net.art
pioneer, Sins of Change 2000). Certain generous and brave curators have
benefited from the spirit of this openness by making their research trips
public (such as Barbara London's Japan journal http://media.moma.org/dot.jp/)
or by sharing their process and knowledge (very notably, Steve Dietz's
publications at http://www.yproductions.com/).

Concerning audience, archiving and economics, artists tend
to ask the most difficult questions, such as Ester Robinson's queries:
"Who is paying for what you are doing? ... Does it live in a place
that no one should care about it? ...Who has ownership? ... How
does it give the audience sustenance?" (Sins of Change, 2000).
Of obvious importance to artists is the whole question of how they can
make a living. Olia Lialina has stated that "My contribution to this discussion
was the first net art gallery, Teleportica. It was to show that net artists
are not the cheapest artists on the market." (Sins of Change, 2000).
Should museums be paying 'per screening' like video or cinema,?
Should they be funding co-productions like films? How do web artists fit
into the Exhibition Payment Right (UK) or CARFAC schedules (Canada)? Media
artists can't survive

... unless museums start to pay artists fair amounts
for linking to their work... amounts that are comparable with what any
other artist showing in a gallery space in the museum would expect to
receive for a whole body of work... one net site is usually not the equivalent
to one painting ... more like a major body of work -- [such as] a
large installation, a substantial video, a series of sculptures.

(Rackham,
2000)

Other artists may see the more popular debate concerning
payment and intellectual property as part of the commercialization of
the Internet rather than as an art debate per se (but these may, of course,
be artists with other sources of income):

I'm always struck by how the mainstream press is obsessed
with the question of how Internet artists are ever going to make a buck
... I recently plodded through stacks of reviews from the '60s of Fluxus
artists smashing violins and pissing in buckets. At the time plenty of
journalists asked 'Why is this art?' or 'Is it theater?'
or 'Is it any good?', but I never saw a single article that
raised the question of how these artists were going to make a living.

(Ippolito, 2000)

The struggle for artists' access to money, resources
and presentation facilities will no doubt continue, but as artists are
the ones who are making the debate as well as the work, they may be "a
test case" in a positive as well as a negative sense -- testing the
institutions in unpredictable and productive ways.

Archives

How can we address the preservation of ideas as opposed
to objects?

(Weil, 2000)

Lev Manovich: I understand your position regarding museums,
art institutions, preserving, archiving, databasing -- but it's
so different from the Futurists who said, 'shoot the painters, burn
the museum.' Here we are -- the avant-garde -- and we want
to keep all the stuff. (...) Maybe we should be looking towards the
future.

Sara Diamond: "It's different when a canon is being
created, as opposed to a movement."

(Sins
of Change 2000)

It seems that every media art festival of the past year
had a panel to address the question of archiving -- often as art (for
example, the panel at ISEA2000 moderated by Karen O'Rourke with Patricia
d'Isola, Christophe Le Francois, Eduardo Kac, Georges Legrady, and Lev
Manovich), but also as a curatorial strategy. Yet despite all the discussions
there remains an ambivalence toward the notion of archiving -- we
don't know what to keep yet, but we need to be able to refer to it.

"We either let it decay online and that's fine or we preserve
the memory and find a form to represent it in a manner that makes sense.
Who in this room has seen the Spiral Jetty? But we all know about
it, at least we have a sense of what the intent was. Going backwards to
understand how this work was produced is a good lesson." (Weil, 2000).

... art critics have suddenly found pioneering figures
in video installation, all from the early 90s. There is in fact a half-century
of pioneers, and now we have to get the word out, not just the work out.
... the genesis of this conference was to address the amnesia of recent
art critics. You must get up and think about them [the early media artists],
teach them, write about them, make people watch them.

(Bruce
Jenkins, film and video curator at Harvard University, Sins of Change
2000).

Furthermore, we're aware that technologically, we're
using media which have, in Bruce Sterling's words, "the life-span
of a hamster" (1995). Showing the work in order to keep it alive, in order
to make it part of a canon, is in fact destroying the work. In the case
of film and video, the work is deteriorating as we watch and learn about
it.

So, if we can't count on being able to keep the obsolescent
technology, we need to be able to keep the intent, the words. Yet the
question of archiving even the discourse which surrounds new media practice
(which we anticipate will be useful to future curators) is itself debated.
For every book published by MIT press, for example, there are a thousand
e-mails on listservs across the globe that get read and deleted. Jennifer
Crowe is constantly revising the guidelines for submissions of projects
and information to the Rhizome database (http://www.rhizome.org).
Then there's the question of whether the discourse exists in the
first place:

... people in art worlds didn't know how to look
at my work, or treat it. So I wrote my own reviews [under the pseudonym
of] Prudence Juris. The reviews would talk about and argue about the work.
Then I would take those articles and show them to the galleries to develop
my own credibility. You have to create the language yourself to promote,
historicize your work. Just doing the work isn't enough. You have to create
preservation on your own.

(Lynn Hershman,
artist, Sins of Change, 2000).

E-mail has made even the museum tradition of filing correspondence
with artists more complicated (few people in the museum world are consistently
diligent enough to print and file a letter about the making or exhibiting
of even a painting, let alone the details of a web commission).

The Walker and other museums have been questioning the feasibility
of offering open source, shared server space to artists. Oliver Grau at
the University of Humboldt in Berlin (http://www.arthist.hu-berlin.de)
is developing a database of virtual art that documents not only the work
of art but also all its different versions, each time it was presented,
what the publicity/criticism of its exhibition was, even who the technicians
who worked on it were. This is an academic (and highly theoretical) endeavour,
but once online could be a model for the preservation of ideas as well
as of the documentation of inherently transitory work.

This, after all, is the mandate of the ZKM. But on that
front there is also the curatorial dilemma of the authority of authoring
through the practice of archiving. How many future new media curators
will see the exhibition net_condition produced by the ZKM as the
official history of net.art? Why aren't Heath Bunting and Irational.org
in the show?

They [ZKM] had a show on Internet art -- I'd
like this to go on the record -- very, very late in the game. They
came very late to discover Internet art. They trailed on the coattails
of other curators. They picked up and accumulated the choices of other
curators. They accumulated them in their show.

(Huffman, 2000)

Sarah Cook: So then what is the future of a new media
curator?

Peter Weibel: to protect media art against the takeover
of the historical art world. Seriously. It's not an easy job.

Sarah Cook: But the historical art world is founded
in part on museums where they collect art. That is why you have new media
institutions like the one we're in now, ZKM, which also collects,
so how is that protecting media art from the art world if museums the
world over are collecting new media art?

Weibel: By two things. First by emphasizing production,
of contemporary, risky, young artists, and then by preserving the work
which is discounted and marginalized by the art institutions.

(Weibel,
2000).

In the field of new media art, the canons are beginning
to appear amongst the hand -to-hand combat concerning archiving. Dust
may continue to obscure the view for some time, but if we archive documents
and records of the early exhibitions as well as recording the work itself,
the history of new media may perhaps be usefully retained. By utilising
the possibilities of new media, the archives may even be creative tools
in their own right.

Audience

Who wants to walk around a gallery if it's full
of toffee-nosed elitists?

If interactive art simply mirrors the game -- its
themes and values -- it becomes symptomatic of uncritical postmodernism
where there is no difference between entertainment and art, where consumerism
reigns. And when, loaded down as amusement, it knocks on the museum door,
it insists on altering how and why museums function, further institutionalizing
art as consumer fun. (Cornwell, 1933, p. 12)

In the early nineties, the utopian excitement about new
and different audiences contrasted sharply with fears that the allure
of 'hands-on technology fun' might be deeply implicated in the
'Disneyfication' of museums. Some time later, the debate is
perhaps less polarized, but still rather contradictory. Shankar Barua
(2000) summarised a situation that has international resonance: "In India
the audience for art galleries is a thin elite. The audience for new media
art is also an elite, but a different one."

Is the audience for net.art a new audience or just the regular
art audience logging on when they should be doing something else? How
does the audience find the site? How does the number of hits to a website
relate to actual use, benefit and pleasure? Is it more about participation
than audience anyway? And how about 'hacktivist' net.art, which
may be deliberately anonymous and covert in its baiting of multinationals,
rather than seeking an audience? For all the internationalist rhetoric,
how does the Internet cope with the practicalities of cross-cultural art
communication? For all of these questions, certain exhibitions and artefacts
provide particular examples, but there is much less information available
from curators and artists about behind-the-scenes data, illuminating failures,
or audience feedback. Those who design museum interpretative sites have
been gathering information for some time on those who use the sites, how
and when. Artists may have very different parameters for judging the 'success'
of their sites, but some data on who visit, and whether they stay for
two seconds or two hours, might be useful, even if only to discover how
best to shock and appall.

As for new media art installations displayed in conventional
gallery and museum spaces, there are some scattered items of information
concerning audience demographics. For example, for one exhibition of interactive
installations in a regional British art museum, the show, when compared
to other contemporary and historical art exhibitions in the same year,
showed little difference in gender numbers, but a significantly higher
proportion of visitors from the "under-20" age bracket (Graham, 1997,
p. 102).

Gathering demographic information is one thing, but judging
the subtleties of audience interaction is another. The entry of new media
art into museums was very much spearheaded by 'the romance of interactivity':

The word interactive sounds like it will alleviate
the alienation of modern life by generating a dynamic alliance between
artists and their audiences, joining them together in a splendid waltz
that lets viewers become equal partners with artists in creating art (Wooster,
1991, p. 294). Since then, the romance has been tempered by some more
critical views on exactly how interactive artefacts are: "For a multimedia
program, a human audience is just a random number generator." (Cubitt,
1999) The knowledge of those designing educational exhibits has also become
pertinent: "To interact is to act reciprocally, to act on each other.
... not merely a machine that the visitor operates ... 'Non-interactive
mechanisms' perhaps sums them up adequately." (Miles, 1988, p.95).
Although artists are understandably wary of 'audience evaluation',
they may be interested in, for example, the results of Stevenson's
(1994) research into hands-on science exhibits which indicates that there
are significant impacts on the long-term memories and understanding of
the audience, rather than merely a case of 'running around pushing
things'.

Some of the commentary on the audience's use of interactive
artworks in galleries has come from critics: "... you really need an hour
alone with the thing, which is impossible under the circumstances of everyday
museum attendance." (Coleman, 1994, p.14). Some has come from artists
themselves, such as David Rokeby's detailed observations on "command"
gestures versus "tentative questioning gestures" in his interactive art
systems (1995, p. 148). Weinbren (1995) and Feingold (1995, p.401) have
also made useful observations on 'control' and 'mastery'
in their own artworks. Research into interactive artworks in galleries
(Graham; 1997, 1999) expected interesting gender differences, but uncovered
instead a surprising tendency for groups to want to use artworks together,
even when this meant squashing uncomfortably into spaces designed for
an individual. This led to a particular interest in artworks which encourage
interaction between audience members, rather than solely between artwork
and audience.

There is still a great deal of uncertainty amongst curators
(and the audience) as to what kind of experience is being offered
by new media art: Quick-fire game pleasure? Information pleasure? Sculptural
pleasure? Sit-on-a-hard-chair-and-watch-a-video pleasure? (Graham, 2001).
As with the Audio Zone artwork using infra-red headphones, this
confusion may be used creatively, but the incredibly diverse range of
expectations about new media art means that it's more than usually
important to try to get some kind of feedback. Matthew Gansallo (2000),
when interviewed about the Mongrel commission for the Tate (http://www.tate.org.uk/webart/),
revealed a wide range of reactions:

... we got a lot of responses back: 'who did
it?' and 'how scary!', and 'is this a site for knowledge?'
and 'what is it?' and 'anyone can put this typically Tate
shock tactics crap [up]!' And we got responses that were 'gosh
this is interesting,' and 'I'm glad they've done this,'
and 'it's good the Tate is large enough to say what you want.'

Whoever the target audience for new media art may be, and
whatever the feedback, Robert Atkins has some pithy parting advice:

"The Top Five strategies for overcoming sloth in your
artistic/curatorial practice in relation to the issue of having your audience
gain access to the work:

5. Don't think technological barriers will fall --
there are ever-increasing barriers of technology business ...

3. Don't lose sight of producers and of quality for
audiences; the more you watch the less you know.

2. Do think hybrid, not just hardware or software. Digital
culture can be simultaneously many things at once; producers and audiences
can both be content creators ... The art-world mix of producers [can create]
another form of knowledge -- from media into media art.

Aesthetics

User experience is what art does best. To change the
interface is to dramatically change the work.

(Lee
Manovich, artist and theorist, Sins of Change 2000)

It's only under huge pressure that a visual arts curator
would agree to hang a video projector, and only if it is agreed the projector
will project an image on the wall and take us back to painting. Only under
threat of torture will a visual arts curator put a computer in the galleries.

(Philippe Verge, Walker Art Center , Sins
of Change 2000)

The aesthetics of new media art is easily ignored in favour
of its function. Moreover, the way a piece of new media art looks and
holds up within the realm of aesthetics is usually masked behind a whack
of media and communication theory -- about networks, about spectacle,
about invisible architectures. Aesthetics, as a philosophy, is an old-fashioned
one, and certainly not one taught in most media schools. It is, however,
a philosophy taught to curators. Hegel taught that to each age there is
an art form, from painting to sculpture to the architecture of the temple
itself; from this we learned not to see art as separate from the age in
which it was produced. New media's very nature -- interactivity
being one aspect -- has demanded of curators different criteria for
the aesthetic evaluation of the works. Would Hegel have placed net.art
as the highest art form for our age?

In his article "The Death of Computer Art", Lev Manovich
(1996) made a distinction between two worlds where art is made and shown,
but where the social definitions of art differ enormously. The first he
called "Duchamp-land" and defined it as: "galleries, major museums, prestigious
art journals"; the second he called "Turing-land" and defined its parameters
as "ISEA, Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH art shows, etc." Manovich's point
was that the two worlds would not converge, that we should not expect
what is being made in Turing-land to be shown in Duchamp-land. The reason
for this, he surmised, was that the typical object admitted to Duchamp-land
prioritizes content and fits within a discourse of irony, self-referentiality
and other things generally postmodern, but that the objects being made
in Turing-land are not ironic because they are oriented towards ever-new
technology rather than content, they are simple in ideas, and they take
their technology very seriously.

This distinction is still valid. Manovich established criteria
for the type of art accepted in each land, but what he didn't
mention then, and what has become paramount now in 2001, are the criteria
for art to be shown in each land-- namely, the questions of
exhibition practices and the field of curatorship. For art to be shown
in Turing-land, it need only apply. All that is needed is some money,
a truck, a power-bar, a plug, a network connection plus a space in a fair
in a convention center, or maybe none of that but ftp and a server. For
art to be shown in Duchamp-land it has to have the interest of a curator,
and with that comes the backing of an institution, a board of directors,
a funding body, an intellectual mass. Unlike the art made in Turing-land,
art in Duchamp-land goes through some process of curatorial legitimization
before it is shown. Curators make regular visits to Turing-land in order
to find things to bring to Duchamp-land (that's how Lev Manovich
ended up in the Walker Art Center -- one of the powerhouses of Duchamp-land).
So in that respect, it might have very little to do with what the work
is actually about. While the two worlds may not have converged, the way
curators move between them has had an effect on the work being produced
in each. Where do you think curators have learned the communication theory
behind which they can hide the lackluster aesthetics of much of new media
art? What is found readymade in Turing-land can always be signed and exhibited
in Duchamp-land.

And has this curatorial "research" had an effect on the
way the work is presented in each? You betcha. Curators beware: 'changing
interface' can change the work. One only has to think of the different
experience of visiting a convention center from visiting a white cube
to realize that the interface is the interaction. The same is the case
on the web -- seeing art in the context of a commercial product-based
site and seeing it in the context of a cultural content-based site can
drastically affect how that work is interpreted.

The best recent example of this was Vivian Selbo's
design for the exhibition Art Entertainment Network (http://aen.walkerart.org).
Creating a customizable interface for the works on view was the artwork
in itself. There was a place to shop, a place to read, a place to listen,
a place to chat ... all things we expect from our web-experience, whether
commercial or cultural. These types of interfaces are clearly needed as
curators have recognized that Duchamp-land-type media art simply doesn't
fly in any place where its irony and content-based form is subsumed by
the pressures of the bottom line.

Though who says aesthetic culture isn't commercial
anyway? Obviously it always has been. Nevertheless, the curating of media
art into Duchamp-land has caused a number of Turing-land artists to reconsider
how they want their work to evolve in the world. Why should it be self-referential
and postmodern just to get the money to be shown in Duchamp-land when
now they can get a lot more money by masking the irony and selling their
skills to the market (which is neither Duchamp nor Turing aware) instead?
As such, a number of web-based artists have turned the lion's share
of their attention away from simply making works of net.art to starting
dot.coms: Vuk Cosic and the Slovenian start-up Literal (http://www.literal.si),
the boys from etoy selling shares as art (http://www.etoy.com),
hans_extrem and his self-professed very expensive consulting company,
Ubermorgen (http://www.ubermorgen.com).

This has created a third problem and brings us back to the
beginning of the vicious circle. How do curators present this type of
overtly commercial and yet slyly Duchampian practice when museums structures
have traditionally dictated that the art shown is not explicitly commercial,
and when at the same time the commercial galleries won't touch new
media art with a ten-foot pole because they can't see its inherent
ephemerality as an investment? Should they even exhibit it? Until Turing-land
and Duchamp-land (and now perhaps Monopoly-land) get themselves sorted
out, the answer seems to be that curators tend to go back to their philosophies
of aesthetics and mask the work behind more theory: beauty with seduction
always sells.

In Conclusion

The reason curators expose themselves to the confusion and
challenge (and carping) of newmedia art might be that the whole mess is
undeniably fascinating and offers opportunities for trying a bold experiment,and
getting it right (or more right than anyone so far). CRUMB aims to provide
some information which might help avoid the alternative of getting it
spectacularly wrong (in a way that someone else has previously got it
wrong). We aim to extend the life-span of the media art hamster by filling
our cheeks with crumbs dropped by curators and others, and all thanks
should go to those who share the knowledge (Steve Dietz and Sara Diamond
particularly), and to all those who agreed to be interviewed about awkward
subjects.

The Museums and the Web conference is one of the few occasions
on which educators and archivists get to meet artists and art curators
and to share information from their varied experience. We hope that people
will contribute to the CRUMB site and discussion list, and add to the
public body of knowledge concerning new media curating.